THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISENumber 874, May 29, 2016Conservatives are collectivists—right-wingsocialists—to whom there are many issues(national security, for one) more importantthan the health, well-being, and rightsof the individual.

Though we have nearly four weeks yet of campaigning, I find it hard to
believe that the European Referendum will end in other than a crushing
defeat for the Leave Campaign. For many on our side, this will be the
end of their hopes. They have spent twenty five years—sometimes
forty—connecting everything bad in this country with membership of
the European Union, and pressing for a referendum. They now have their
referendum. It will be lost. Age alone will give many of them nowhere
to go. Some will pass the rest of their lives complaining that the
vote was rigged. Most will drift away into confused silence. My own
view is that the Referendum was always a mistaken strategy, and that
its loss will bring an end to one of the less valuable chapters in the
history of our movement.

The failure of the Leave Campaign can in part be blamed on the
personalities involved. They are generally chancers and incompetents.
If there is some reason to believe they were bought off in advance,
nothing involving Boris Johnson was bound to end other than in defeat.
I have always thought him a sinister buffoon. The only reason he
became and stayed Mayor of London was that he was running against Ken
Livingstone. Even I might have voted for him. Everything else achieved
in his life has been the effect of sucking up to the right people. I
have barely anything good to say about Michael Gove, and nothing good
about Michael Howard or the others whose faces I see in my occasional
skim of the BBC website.

In part, though, the failure is structural. The Leave Campaign has no
plan for how to leave and what to do afterwards. It has none because
none of the many plans on offer has general support. The Remain side
can unite round a clear and simple message: we are better off in the
European Union. The Leave side is a loose coalition with nothing in
common beyond wanting to leave the European Union. Do we repeal the
European Communities Act, scrap virtually all the regulations from
Brussels and elsewhere, and practise unilateral free trade? Or do we
disengage using the treaty mechanism, and then keep most of the
regulations? Or do we try for a Keynesian siege economy? There is no
agreement. If the Leave Campaign were to speak in details, it would
disintegrate. The alternative, of being torn apart by the Remain side,
is ruinous though preferable. So long as the campaign remains in
being, something might turn up before polling day.

But I return to the matter of personality. Every so often, I see an
opinion article that speaks about a "freewheeling, buccaneering"
Britain outside the European Union. I think this is meant to be an
appeal to some fading memory of Francis Drake or Robert Clive. I
know—and so does everyone else—that it simply looks forward to
having London as a giant offshore casino, with a few warehousing jobs
on minimum wage for the rest of us. Mainstream conservatism in this
country has morphed into support of a soft money corporatism designed
to suck wealth upwards. In terms of what it offers ordinary people, it
is no better than European social democracy—and may be worse.

The truth is that the European Union is a nuisance. It hides political
accountability and raises business costs. At almost no point, however,
does it touch on the real problem we face, which is dispossession of
our identity and freedom. It has given us neither Balkanisation nor a
police state. Leaving would not in itself undo what has been done to
us since 1979 or before. The same ruling class would be in place. This
might no longer be able to hide behind the fig leaf of international
agreements. On the other hand, it would no longer be obliged to keep
in step with a cartel of other ruling classes, not all of them equally
malevolent in every respect.

The ultimate cause of all the problems we face is not a few Directives
that may or may not exist about the curvature of bananas. It is that
we no longer see ourselves as a distinctive people, able and willing
to hold onto our ancestral homeland and our ancestral ways. Membership
if the European Union is one symptom of this collective failure. So is
multiculturalism. So is our cultural prostration before America. So is
the degeneracy of our rulers, and the immiserisation of our working
classes. These symptoms cannot be addressed before the cause is
addressed.

So, how to address the cause? Let us rule out a rich man willing to
lavish money on us. The money would not come to us, but be grabbed by
the usual suspects and spent on cocaine and whores in the usual
manner. The rich man would almost certainly be a fool, more focussed
on speaking in the Albert Hall than on doing something useful. And I
doubt there are any rich men on our side—certainly none likely to
make even a third rate Donald Trump. What I suggest instead is a
growth of self-sufficient communities of interest.

We need to form closer bonds with each other than the commonalities of
outlook that have brought us together. Because state and corporate
employments are increasingly closed to us, we are forced to consider
self-employment. This gives us the moral advantage of independence.
This being said, the self-employed flourish best not as isolated
individuals, competing in some anonymous market, but as members of
tight networks. We need to do business with each other, and to help
each other. In every respect where it can be given, we must give
regular preference to each other. We should employ builders and window
cleaners who share our outlook. We should expect preference in the
sale of our own talents from those who share our outlook. We need our
own schools and institutions of learning and research, our own orders
of distinction and merit. We need standards by which to discipline the
unworthy, or purge them from our communities, and to prevent
infiltration. We need to show indifference to smears from the ruling
class media, and discretion and flexibility enough to shelter us from
its direct invasions.

Now, I am not suggesting withdrawal and quietism, even if that might
be the result for some of us. The purpose is to create communities
with institutions of outreach and proselytism, and a cultural revival
and style of life that makes us worth listening to. It is not an
unprecedented strategy. It has, with necessary variations, been
followed by every group of outsiders who survived and flourished and
had eventual influence. I think of Christians in the second and third
centuries, or Jews in twentieth century England, or Moslems at the
moment in England. These are all examples from which we can learn.

How long before these communities can grow into a network of
communities able to have a measurable influence on our national life?
I have no idea. But I do insist that, had this been our strategy in
1992, some difference might now have been made. Instead—and, so far
as I have been alive and active in this time, I do not exclude myself
from the blame—we have spent a quarter of a century variously
whining about the Maastricht Treaty and helping rich men grow still
richer by arguing for the transfer of state monopolies into their
hands. It is simply unfortunate if we must begin a strategy that might
work somewhat later than we should have. But nothing can be achieved
otherwise. The sooner we begin, the better it will be.

So let us get the Referendum over and done with. Let it go 60:40, or
75:25, or only 55:45. Even let it be narrowly "won"—it will make no
difference. What we badly need is to stop fighting what time has shown
to be the wrong battle. We must stop mistaking symptoms for causes.
There is no with-a-bound-he-was-free option. Voting will not
save us. If we are to save our country, we must start with ourselves.

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